Darktrace vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Darktrace
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Darktrace AI interrupts in-progress cyber-attacks, including ransomware, email phishing, and threats to cloud environments. It's able to detect and establish baselines for your organization so it can make the distinction between what is and what isn't normal network activity for your organization. This allows it to tackle complex cyber-attacks as they happen and prevent future cyber-attacks from happening.N/A
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Defender ATP) is a holistic, cloud delivered endpoint security solution that includes risk-based vulnerability management and assessment, attack surface reduction, behavioral based and cloud-powered next generation protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), automatic investigation and remediation, managed hunting services, rich APIs, and unified security management.
$2.50
per user/per month
Pricing
DarktraceMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Academic
$2.50
per user/per month
Standalone
$5.20
per user/per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DarktraceMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DarktraceMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Considered Both Products
Darktrace
Chose Darktrace
Darktrace does a very good job at complementing our other security tools by adding an additional level of automated security. It is important to point out that the automation is optional. We ran Darktrace in "manual" mode until we were comfortable enough to switch it to a …
Chose Darktrace
Darktrace allows you to get under the hood in a way that few other services of this type allow.
Chose Darktrace
Its capabilities to respond to a threat both manual than automated way makes Darktrace one of the best NDR in the market. The rules editor allows the right flexibility to build a set of rules sized for the infrastructure, while the third parties integrations and modules helps …
Chose Darktrace
Darktrace is better in terms of scalability, ease of integration, and ongoing support
Chose Darktrace
The product's capacity to provide insights into network traffic is impressive. The organisation was able to find any malware harming the devices with their assistance. We really value network monitoring and self-learning monitoring tools.
Chose Darktrace
We looked into several competitors and are still looking, due to the problems Darktrace has with false positives. Darktrace is attractive as their support is generally good, and working with the product is relatively easy.
Chose Darktrace
We have not evaluated others as they seem to be in their own class.
Chose Darktrace
The weekly reports was why we chose DarkTrace.
Chose Darktrace
We did NOT select Darktrace. OSSIM/AlienVault is a more mature product and it provided better intelligence and reporting. The end user interface is much easier to use - and you can tell built form engineers who have had to do the work. My suggestion for anyone considering …
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
I've used Sophos, Bitdefender, SentinelOne, and, of course, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. We chose this at the time because we were such a Microsoft shop that it just seemed to integrate well with all the other things that we had set up with Microsoft.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Previously, we've used Sophos. We've used, way back when, McAfee, Norton, Symantec, all those. And we finally settled on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. We're a Microsoft technology stack shop. So obviously it was natural. It's built into Windows, so we're not adding …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
When building up policies, being independent is much easier compared to CrowdStrike, I would say.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Say licensing and cost primarily. And from our evaluation and our use cases, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint did relatively the same thing.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Unless you have a dedicated Security Operations Center working twenty four hours a day seven days a week that is able to constantly monitor Cylance and make the necessary changes for your users, it is not worth the trouble. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint does what it needs to …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint consistently showed better user experiences during scans due to the reduced amount of resources used on each system compared to our previous endpoint protection solutions. However, the main reason we chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint offers strong integration with Microsoft 365 and Azure services, which provide a unified security experience. While McAfee Trellix is known for solid antivirus, Microsoft Defender excels in integration in the ecosystem.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Defender is far easier to deploy and manage than Sophos and tends to work without as many issues. The threat assessment portal provides an in-depth view of the organization's security posture, whereas Sophos only shows the patching status of the PCs. We did need Intune to get …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
As Microsoft Defender for Endpoint easily integrated with our Office 365 setup, it was more beneficial as compared to other products
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Cylance's policy is to block everything and requires an active person to monitor and unblock legitimate processes. As updates and software continue to evolve, it is a full-time job to be a Cylance administrator. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a set-and-forget solution that …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is the most cost effective solution considering our Microsoft 365 licensing status. While many 3rd party solutions are great and have been used over the years, in the non-profit world, cost is a huge driving factor of items. Coupled with …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is on par or exceeds the competitor products and provides an enterprise grade EDR solution. Based on the savings by bundling Microsoft products under the E5 license and the benefits it provides; it is an excellent choice for customers looking for …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
MDE integrates much more into our M365 ecosystem than any other MDR possibly could. Bitdefender may have provided a similar level of endpoint protection but the reporting, vulnerability reporting and other incident tracking and correlation are critical in today's business …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Crowdstrike is the more feature complete product but licensing model and cost does not work well with the small business model. ESET Protect is considerably more complicated from a licensing perspective but once operational is a fine product.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is far more robust and easy to use than NinjaOne's RMM tools. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint allows us to easily manage our endpoints, from an almost single pane of glass, whereas Ninja has multiple settings, policies, etc. that are harder to …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
We use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint along with Crowdstrike on some of our critical systems as it enhances the protection we have for our environment.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
It's very convenient and very well integrated with our environment.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Majorly because our suite is Microsoft, so make totally sense to have this in the company and the price. It is Microsoft is better than CrowdStrike.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Sophos. Because of the integration with Microsoft ecosystem, we selected Defender.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
We have not used anything else other than Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Maybe we've used other antivirus software like Sophos and things like that. They're just not all encompassing and that's why we moved to use this product.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
I have been working with customers that they are transitioning from Sentinel One, CrowdStrike to Defender for Endpoint, right? So I think it's because they see the value in the product and also they see how much they can save in terms of the cost for companies because they …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
We previously used CrowdStrike on our servers. However, the seamless integration of Microsoft Defender (MD) with XDR and the entire Microsoft ecosystem led us to choose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE).
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
What we love more about this product is the way this pro gets integrated into the other family of solutions, especially Defender for Identity or the XDR solutions. We think that the market, the customers are full of unattended consults coming out from different vendors and that …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
The technical features, usability and the support was nice as compared to the other products.
Features
DarktraceMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Endpoint Security
Comparison of Endpoint Security features of Product A and Product B
Darktrace
-
Ratings
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
8.7
Ratings
2% above category average
Anti-Exploit Technology00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)00 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Centralized Management00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Hybrid Deployment Support00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Infection Remediation00 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Vulnerability Management00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Malware Detection00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DarktraceMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Small Businesses
Auvik
Auvik
Score 8.8 out of 10
ThreatLocker
ThreatLocker
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Score 9.2 out of 10
BlackBerry Protect (CylancePROTECT)
BlackBerry Protect (CylancePROTECT)
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Score 9.2 out of 10
BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management
BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DarktraceMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.7
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.5
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DarktraceMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
Likelihood to Recommend
Darktrace would be well suited to any environment really; the only constraint would be the budget. The cost scales on the number of devices to be monitored by the product, so it can be quite expensive in larger environments. Any company that would benefit from having 24/7 monitoring of their network would find that this product would suit that need perfectly. It can also create a number of reports, which is useful if you have any requirement to present periodic figures and statistics for your network. There are also additional features available and in development such as Antigena, which can be configured to allow potential threats to be automatically mitigated; it can block connections to a certain address, using certain ports, or it can enforce "normal behaviour" where it will only allow a machine to communicate in a way that Darktrace has observed before and considers normal. This has huge benefits particularly for 24/7 organisations where you don't have the ability to have someone monitoring the network personally at all times, as it could stop a malware outbreak in its tracks.
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I can definitely tell you where it’s more suited, because we haven’t come across any less appropriate scenarios. But definitely in regard to how we centrally manage our user space and our endpoints, it’s been beneficial from an API perspective and is really transferable, with strong collaboration with our Azure stack. It works very well.
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Pros
  • Uses it Al model UEBA to detect anomalies in the behaviour of not only the users in a corporate network but also the routers, servers, and endpoints in that network.
  • Provides a visualisation of both egress and outbound network traffics flowing in and out of the organisation.
  • Darktrace comes with it autonomous AI model detection and responses capabilities.
  • Darktrace as an AI next generation NDR solution, prevents ,contains and quarantines malicious traffics from and into the corporate network.
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  • It really protects our endpoints. We've used other antivirus programs in the past, and they haven't had that full confidence in those products compared to what Microsoft Defender for Endpoint does for us.
  • Another pro is that it's easy to manage the management console through Intune to see Microsoft Defender for Endpoint up in the cloud and see the state of our devices.
  • Another pro is we haven't had an incident since we installed it.
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Cons
  • The system has so many features and places to tweak we found it hard to tune for our use.
  • We met regularly with someone from Darktrace to assist us in processing the alerts
  • The process for mail scanning requires you to reroute mail traffic
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  • It would be good to continue to minimize the amount of resources needed during a scan
  • Provide more integration with Outlook to scan attachments with a notification that everything is good
  • Provide a Click to Fix option when listing issues or high-risk problems on systems
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Likelihood to Renew
It's a powerfull product that help administrators to provide email security to our organization.
Good metrics about received emails that help us to determine in doubt case if the email is a false positive or it's malware.
They're improving the product releasing continuous updates and have mobile phone app to manage it.
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Microsoft Defender is closely catching -up in market with existing competitors they have added DLP endpoint & DLP Network and Cloud DLP solution last year with OCR capabilities. I would say Microsoft Defender is not legacy Vendor in end point security, the need to learn from other vendors in market and focus on new XDR technologies, which is going to be new battle for all vendors
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Usability
The Darktrace toolset is very expansive, allowing it to handle many different tasks, but this leads to a user interface that is sometimes not at all intuitive. Icons don't always make sense visually, and the associated tool tips do not always provide enough detail on what action the button performs
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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a great EDR to have that works quickly and silently in the background and it integrates well with other Microsoft services. As an IT manager, I can appreciate that I do not get bombarded by alerts for every small detail. On the flipside, the management site can use some work in being more clear and should be more streamlined so I'm not clicking through multiple pages to figure out what happened
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint chugs along just fine no matter what we throw at it and what systems it's running on. It doesn't take up a lot of resources either, so that's welcomed.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easy on memory and resources on clients.
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Support Rating
Darktrace support is excellent in my experience. They send a competent engineer on-site to provide on-boarding training. They were also very responsive in responding to questions and concerns. Having an individual point of contact who is a competent network and security engineer is not a common experience, at least for me.
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Overall support is really good for this product. Since it's a Microsoft product, you will get good support from a number of different resources, including knowledgebase articles on the web, support from Microsoft technicians, and documentation (which tends to very thorough). Also, there is a vast user support community for this product, so user support forums would also be another valuable channel to get help if needed. I don't envision too many people will have issues/problems with the product, as it tends to run good overall.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Deployment was handled by our team here and everything went pretty smoothly. We did have a few hiccups in our test group, but that only took a bit to get ironed out.
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Alternatives Considered
We did NOT select Darktrace. OSSIM/AlienVault is a more mature product and it provided better intelligence and reporting. The end user interface is much easier to use - and you can tell built form engineers who have had to do the work. My suggestion for anyone considering Darktrace, is to get the price upfront; do a 30/60 onsite trail; and do the same thing, at the same time, with AlienVault. AlientVault will win every time. I say that because that's exactly what I did.
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I've used Sophos, Bitdefender, SentinelOne, and, of course, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. We chose this at the time because we were such a Microsoft shop that it just seemed to integrate well with all the other things that we had set up with Microsoft.
Read full review
Scalability
No answers on this topic
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easily scaled from small orgs to giant enterprises.
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Return on Investment
  • One big positive is how it helps us with the security assessments that clients have done on us. They are looking to see if we know how we might have unusual/malicious traffic running on the network.
  • If you have a small network and only need 1 appliance, it can be a good ROI and peace of mind.
  • You could go down a hole in trying to spend time looking at all of your traffic with this software. You need to focus only on what it is showing as potential bad traffic.
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  • Another positive impact is that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is built into the Windows OS. So naturally, it is much easier to load it out and manage it, rather than acquiring it through party ER, deploying it, and managing it separately. So that's definitely on the positive side that we observe there's a byproduct of changing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.
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ScreenShots

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Screenshots

Screenshot of blocked activitiesScreenshot of Detects & respondsScreenshot of discovers vulnerabilityScreenshot of Eliminates blind spotsScreenshot of Risk management